It whirled right-about-face and praised the telephone to the skies. "Suddenly and quietly the whole human race is brought within speaking and hearing distance," it exclaimed;"scarcely anything was more desired and more impossible." The next paper to quit the mob of scoffers was the Tatler, which said in an editorial peroration, "We cannot but feel im-pressed by the picture of a human child commanding the subtlest and strongest force in Nature to carry, like a slave, some whisper around the world."Closely after the scientists and editors came the nobility. The Earl of Caithness led the way. He declared in public that "the telephone is the most extraordinary thing I ever saw in my life." And one wintry morning in 1878Queen Victoria drove to the house of Sir Thomas Biddulph, in London, and for an hour talked and listened by telephone to Kate Field, who sat in a Downing Street office. Miss Field sang "Kathleen Mavourneen," and the Queen thanked her by telephone, saying she was "immensely pleased." She congratulated Bell himself, who was present, and asked if she might be permitted to buy the two telephones; whereupon Bell presented her with a pair done in ivory.
This incident, as may be imagined, did much to establish the reputation of telephony in Great Britain. A wire was at once strung to Windsor Castle. Others were ordered by the Daily News, the Persian Ambassador, and five or six lords and baronets. Then came an order which raised the hopes of the telephone men to the highest heaven, from the banking house of J.
S. Morgan & Co. It was the first recognition from the "seats of the mighty" in the business and financial world. A tiny exchange, with ten wires, was promptly started in London;and on April 2d, 1879, Theodore Vail, the young manager of the Bell Company, sent an order to the factory in Boston, "Please make one hundred hand telephones for export trade as early as possible." The foreign trade had begun.
Then there came a thunderbolt out of a blue sky, a wholly unforeseen disaster. Just as a few energetic companies were sprouting up, the Postmaster General suddenly proclaimed that the telephone was a species of telegraph. According to a British law the telegraph was required to be a Government monopoly. This law had been passed six years before the telephone was born, but no matter. The telephone men protested and argued. Tyndall and Lord Kelvin warned the Government that it was making an indefensible mistake. But nothing could be done. Just as the first railways had been called toll-roads, so the telephone was solemnly declared to be a telegraph. Also, to add to the absurd humor of the situation, Judge Stephen, of the High Court of Justice, spoke the final word that compelled the telephone legally to be a telegraph, and sustained his opinion by a quotation from Webster's Dictionary, which was published twenty years before the telephone was invented.
Having captured this new rival, what next?
The Postmaster General did not know. He had, of course, no experience in telephony, and neither had any of his officials in the telegraph department. There was no book and no college to instruct him. His telegraph was then, as it is to-day, a business failure. It was not earning its keep. Therefore he did not dare to shoulder the risk of constructing a second system of wires, and at last consented to give licenses to private companies.
But the muddle continued. In order to compel competition, according to the academic theories of the day, licenses were given to thir-teen private companies. As might have been expected, the ablest company quickly swallowed the other twelve. If it had been let alone, this company might have given good service, but it was hobbled and fenced in by jealous regulations.
It was compelled to pay one-tenth of its gross earnings to the Post Office. It was to hold itself ready to sell out at six months' notice.
And as soon as it had strung a long-distance system of wires, the Postmaster General pounced down upon it and took it away.
Then, in 1900, the Post Office tossed aside all obligations to the licensed company, and threw open the door to a free-for-all competition. It undertook to start a second system in London, and in two years discovered its blunder and proposed to cooperate. It granted licenses to five cities that demanded municipal ownership.
These cities set out bravely, with loud beating of drums, plunged from one mishap to another, and finally quit. Even Glasgow, the premier city of municipal ownership, met its Waterloo in the telephone. It spent one million, eight hundred thousand dollars on a plant that was obsolete when it was new, ran it for a time at a loss, and then sold it to the Post Office in 1906 for one million, five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.
So, from first to last, the story of the telephone in Great Britain has been a "comedy of errors."There are now, in the two islands, not six hundred thousand telephones in use. London, with its six hundred and forty square miles of houses, has one-quarter of these, and is gaining at the rate of ten thousand a year. No large improvements are under way, as the Post Office has given notice that it will take over and operate all private companies on New Year's Day, 1912.
The bureaucratic muddle, so it seems, is to continue indefinitely.
In Germany there has been the same burden of bureaucracy, but less backing and filling.
There is a complete government monopoly.
Whoever commits the crime of leasing telephone service to his neighbors may be sent to jail for six months. Here, too, the Postmaster General has been supreme. He has forced the telephone business into a postal mould. The man in a small city must pay as high a rate for a small service, as the man in a large city pays for a large service. There is a fair degree of efficiency, but no high speed or record-breaking.
